Having a hell of a time getting the CS4231 in my sun blade 2000 to work. The modules are all loaded, and it shows up in /proc/asound. But I get an error whenever I try to play something out. Should /dev/dsp be linked to something? What gives?

Nah when I try to open alsamixer, it spouts an error that it can't connect to soundctl or something like that. I am not at home sorry I can't be more exact, I won't be back at home til friday night. Any ideas?

I had some difficulty getting the CS4321 working in my Ultra 2 Enterprise as well. IIRC I had to compile the Sun audio stuff into the kernel (not as a module). Also I am talking about the separate section for Sun audio that is NOT in the Alsa or OSS section. As much as I tried I could not get it to work as modules. Otherwise it seemed to work fine._________________Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script.

Works fine as modules on my u5 and u10.
Did you customize /etc/modules.d/alsa to load snd-sun-cs4231 and init via /etc/init.d/alsasound?
Also you gotta be in the audio group as a user to be able to touch anything sound-related._________________Gustavo Zacarias
Gentoo/SPARC monkey

I'm not very familiar with the varieties of Sun hardware but I think the U5 has a PCI bus while my U2E is Sbus/UPA. Perhaps the varied bus types make a difference here? Just curious... Incidentally the box I speak of is currently decommissioned so checking the specifics on mine is not likely._________________Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script.

There were some fixes for sun-snd-cs4231 support in SBUS-based machines in later kernels (2.6.19 or newer IIRC).
I'd suggest you try 2.6.20-gentoo-latest to see if that helps.
2.6.20-gentoo-* isn't stable yet because it doesn't ship firmware needed for FC-AL PCI (QLogic-based) machines like Blade 1000, 2000, Fire 280R and some others, and genkernel should be shaped into helping with firmware loading to get this issue sorted out.
2.6.20 probably won't help likwid since it's PCI-based and cs4231 is probably on the ebus like on the u5/10, even though it improves there too reducing some of the latency (for example for SIP clients and such applications)._________________Gustavo Zacarias
Gentoo/SPARC monkey

Thanks Gus it was the audio group thing. aplay works fine, but I still can't seem to get KDE apps to play sound. artsd fails with "Bus Error" when I try to start it manually. Any ideas? Should I start a new thread in multimedia?

audacious is good for lightweight if you liked xmms (you'll have to use esd or oss output rather than alsa, it seems to stutter otherwise).
On the heavyweight side there's amarok for kde-native people or rhythmbox for gnome-native.
There are many many more, i've found audacious works nice for me and has a loadsome of input plugins to handle almost any audio file._________________Gustavo Zacarias
Gentoo/SPARC monkey

mplayer works a charm too though i didn't try wmv videos on it.
However with mplayerplug-in and a powerful enough cpu you can watch apple trailer in firefox for example._________________Gustavo Zacarias
Gentoo/SPARC monkey

Actually after my last rebuild arts doesn't work either.
AFAIK arts is going away for kde anyway so there's not much point in getting it fixed (unless someone is really bored)._________________Gustavo Zacarias
Gentoo/SPARC monkey